"They're taking a very restrained approach to this, so much likeJawsdid — Steven Spielberg didn't always show the beast, [yet] the essence is present and it's there and it's moving and you know and it's creepy and it's — so the tension will mount for sure."

When the Big Bad is a monster — especially a large monster — it is imperative to avoid showing us the monster for as long as possible.

It is OK to show small portions of the monster (tails, claws, etc.) earlier; the filmmaker should be toward revealing such a monster as an exotic dancer is toward removing her clothing. But the full reveal of the monster should take a long time — at least several episodes on television; at least twenty or thirty minutes in film.

The larger and badder the monster, the longer it will take for them to become visible.

Episode five and Daemon hasn't arrived to Shinjuku… *sigh* Oh well, I just hope I actually get him in there before chapter eight, and I expect to finish this story in twenty chapters in the worst case scenario.

Alien, with the added bonus of including only three jump scares in the entire film... and only one of them has anything to do with the eponymous xenomorph.

The 1998 American Godzilla may well provide the quintessential example. A monster the size of a skyscraper manages to travel halfway around the world while being stalked by the US military, attacks Manhattan, and yet still does not fully appear on screen for forty-five minutes.

Cloverfield. Very closely related to the Godzilla example, you don't get to see the entire thing until nearly half the movie has gone by. Not only is its appearance rather hard to explain without seeing the movie, it's quite ugly too. For both films, the entire strategy behind their marketing campaigns was to avoid showing the monsters so that audiences would go see the movies to find out what they looked like for themselves.

King Kong. Justified in that the main characters have to travel for a long time in order to see the monster.

Predator: Only the view of the soldiers from the predator's eye-view, then a view of the cloaked predator, then close-ups of him patching up his wound, a full-body view, and finally the unmasking.

Averted by Rawhead Rex; it was Clive Barker's intent to make the monster as visible as possible early in the film.

In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the monster is visible (as Robert Patrick in police blues) from the beginning, but its superpowers (and stunning visual effects) are trickled in as per Monster Delay. The powers are hinted at with first encounter, their lethality is realized with the death of the foster parents, and they're fully exploited to the limits in the double-finale.

Independence Day: While the giant spacecraft are not exactly monsters, they're definitely treated in the same way. The ships are shrouded in mysterious stormy clouds until they actually reach the destinations cities and emerge in their full terrifying majesty.

Godzilla (2014) used this with Godzilla, at least in part. Godzilla didn't fully appear until about halfway through the movie, and he didn't have more than a few seconds of screentime until the final act of the film.

Literature

Exaggerated in Stephen King'sIt, which first introduces Pennywise the Monster Clown as It's avatar, then later reveals It's physical form to be more akin to a giant spider. That is only a partial manifestation of It's interdimensional form, which is even more terrifying to the characters. Just perceiving It risks making you lose your mind.

Amnesia: The Dark Descentruns on this trope; the first glimpse of a monster is a silhouette hobbling through the fog. It doesn't reappear in that area, but the suspense alone stops you from finding out. Even if you try to get a decent look at the monster later on, the game forces you to stop to keep it as scary as possible. The mere grotesqueness of it causes you character to lose sanity just by looking at it, increasing the likelihood of being found and killed unless you look away.

In Final Fantasy X, you see bits and pieces of Sin, but not the entire thing until its third appearance. Interestingly, its earlier glimpses make it look much more like an Eldritch Abomination than its full body, which is something like a blind whale with extra designs on it.

Cold Fear milks this trope for all it's worth in the beginning. You know there's zombies; they're on the cover. The first Jump Scare? It's a wave. The second? The panicked crew of the whaler shooting at you because they think you're a zombie. The third one, the chain dragging toward you? Literally a chain dragging on the ground. It leads you on for so long with fake scares that the eventual real one actually scares you good.

Metroid: Fusion: That One Boss, Nightmare is first rendered as a shadow running rampant throughout one of the subsections. Mission Control tells Samus to ignore it and fix the crises in the other subsections. Finally it turns out Nightmare's rampage threatens the entire station, prompting Mission Control to give its creepy backstory and dispatch Samus to destroy it. Its lair seems to be in some kind of junkyard/robot graveyard.

Dragon Age: Origins brings up the Archdemon as the rallying force behind the Darkspawn Horde very early on but it's not until much later in the game that you actually learn what it is and what it looks like (a giant corrupted dragon). Throughout the game, you come in contact with it maybe three times: twice in cutscenes (in a nightmare, which only shows glimpses of it, and down in the Deep Roads, where you first see it in its entirety) and once in the very lastBoss Fight.

In the Ed, Edd n Eddy episode "The Day the Ed Stood Still", Ed's friends dress him up like a monster, and Ed proceeds to get a little too into character and go on a rampage. Ed's monster costume isn't seen in full until about two-thirds of the way into the cartoon.

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